Getting an exclusive opportunity is exciting, but it can also create unexpected tensions, especially when others feel left out.

Now, imagine you had to choose between making a once-in-a-lifetime moment extra special for your child and keeping the peace with others.

Would you avoid upsetting everyone else?

Or would you make sure your daughter got to enjoy the experience?

In today’s story, one mom deals with this exact scenario and wonders whether she made the right decision.

Here’s what happened

AITA for taking my daughter on a backstage visit that excluded her friends?

I’m (34F), a retired trapeze artist and my daughter (6F) is enrolled in circus school.

She loves it so much that she asked to see a Cirque du Soleil show as a birthday present.

My husband (37M) and I managed to get discount tickets to take her and three of her friends from circus school on a 2-hour drive to catch the nearest show.

When I got there, I checked the company credits and noticed that a friend of mine, an acrobat from Belgium, was one of the performers.

I hadn’t seen him in years and sent him a message on Instagram just to say I was in the audience with my daughter and excited to see him.

He replied almost immediately and told me to look for a stage manager after the show so we could say hi, and I could take my daughter backstage.

And so I did.

The two of them went backstage while everyone else waited.

Since he only invited my daughter and me (I didn’t mention in my short message there were three other girls + my husband, and I couldn’t impose taking a small party backstage), my husband waited with the girls for about 20 min after the show was over while we toured backstage.

My daughter was so happy!

She kept talking about it on the way home, and that’s when I realized the other girls could be feeling left out.

What do you know?

Here’s where everything took a negative turn.

The same night, one of the girls’ mothers called me to say her daughter came home crying because she didn’t get to go backstage and that it was very poor form on my part to invite them to a party and exclude them from one of the experiences.

I tried to explain how things played out, but she kept being aggressive.

I finally lost it and told her she had no right to call me and try to reprimand me and should instead have a talk to her daughter about how to deal with such frustrations.

My husband says I should not have instigated it and that, in hindsight, I shouldn’t have split the party.

AITA?

It’s easy to see both sides of this, but she probably should’ve mentioned the other people.

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit feel about her decision.

As this comment points out, it won’t be the last time kids deal with these types of situations.

Here’s someone who thinks the other mother was right.

Great thoughts.

True, she could’ve gone about this other ways.

There’s nothing wrong with what she did.

However, she should’ve asked if the other kids could come because they were pretty young.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.